FILM REVIEW -- Gay Issues at an `Elementary' Level / How schools teach about sexuality

EDWARD GUTHMANN, Chronicle Staff Critic

Published 4:00 am, Wednesday, October 2, 1996

IT'S ELEMENTARY: Documentary. Directed by Debra Chasnoff and Helen Cohen. (Not rated. 75 minutes. At the Castro today and tomorrow, and at the UC Theater in Berkeley October 7 and 8.)

For Debra Chasnoff, the San Francisco filmmaker who called for a boycott of General Electric with her film "Deadly Deception" and won an Oscar in the process, there doesn't seem to be any subject too sensitive for the screen.

In her new film, the moving "It's Elementary," Chasnoff and co-director Helen Cohen break ground by taking on the American education system and exploring ways to appropriately teach elementary schoolchildren about gays and lesbians.

Opening today at the Castro for a two-day run, and October 7 and 8 at the UC Theater in Berkeley, "It's Elementary" offers an unabashedly biased, upbeat look at a subject that most parents would probably rather see disappear. Politically, it's a stick of dynamite -- a fact that Chasnoff tries to defuse in the first scene, when she shows a third grader asking, "Who really cares if you're gay? It's like, what's the big whoop?"

ON LOCATION IN SCHOOLS

Inspired by the 1992 Republican Convention, when Chasnoff, the lesbian mother of two sons, perceived politicians using homosexuality to provoke hatred and fears, "It's Elementary" was filmed at six elementary and middle schools where teachers and administrators are finding, lo and behold, that schoolchildren are hipper to gay issues than they ever suspected.

"It's already there; the kids are already thinking about it," says a Madison, Wis., teacher who teaches his students about famous gays, lesbians and bisexuals in the arts. Michelangelo and Frida Kahlo are part of his lesson plan.

Without glossing over parents' apprehensions, Chasnoff and Cohen dispel the greatest fear -- that teachers would describe sexual practices. "I don't think that's appropriate for elementary schoolchildren," says one educator. "It would make them uncomfortable. But talking about biases and discrimination, and how that affects people's lives, is appropriate."

Chasnoff, who made an earlier film called "Choosing Children," which describes the child rearing options open to gays and lesbians, also finds a hero in Thomas W. Price, a principal at the Cambridge Friends School in Massachusetts.

'Mom Is Queer'

It's irresponsible, Price says, for schools to brush the subject of homosexuality under the carpet. "When you allow a child on a playground to hurl an insult at another child or to say 'Your mom is queer' without (teachers) addressing the issues, (that) is, I think, unconscionable."

Of course, the schools spotlighted in "It's Elementary," in San Francisco, New York, Madison and Cambridge, Mass., are in liberal pockets that don't necessarily reflect prevailing American attitudes toward gays and lesbians.

Even in San Francisco, however, the curiosity of some students is surprising. When Robert Roth invites a pair of gay and lesbian guest speakers to his eighth grade social studies class, the students ask questions that leave their sophistication in doubt: If a woman has short hair, one wants to know, "does that make her a dyke?"

"How can you tell when someone else is gay?" another one asks, followed by, "If you could start over, would you want to be straight?" And the inevitable: "How do you guys do it?"

"It's Elementary" makes its arguments in a positive, nonthreatening fashion, and takes a very large first step toward creating an important dialogue.